Page 62 of Conquered (Highgate Preparatory Academ:y Compendium)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

JAX

I watch as sleep overtakes Lilly’s beautiful features, a deep furrow in between her brows that I hate seeing there.

Loki told Lilly it'll be okay, but how can it be? That cunt, that dead man fucking walking, touched her. He hurt her, tried to take what didn't belong to him. She's fucking ours, and no one, no motherfucking one, gets to lay a finger on her but us.

I reach out, my hand falling on her soft waist, and she sighs in her sleep.

My heart stopped in my chest when she ran into the dorm, bleeding and eyes wild, full of panic like a deer who’s been caught by a hunter.

Our beautiful, strong girl was broken, and we'd done it to her just as much as that bastard.

Guilt slithers over me, sticky and viscous as tar when I recall how we iced her out, taking the pain of her supposed rejection out on her.

It was bullshit! She’s a normal fucking girl, and our lives are anything but normal. How could we have just expected her to have been cool with it? With what we have to do? Especially after what happened to her mom.

And look what fucking happened because of our stupid fucking reaction. This is as much our fault as that fucker’s, Robert . We may as well have thrown her to him, abandoning her like we did. I feel sick with the knowledge that we're to blame. We didn't protect her when she needed us most.

And I'll spend every damn day for the rest of my cursed life making it up to her.

LOKI

I pull Lilly in closer, holding her so tightly I'm surprised that she can still breathe.

Tears prick my eyes when I remember how she ran straight into Jax's arms and broke down earlier.

I look up over her head and see Jax's eyes in the low light.

They reflect the self-loathing and crippling guilt that I feel inside.

We failed our beautiful girl, the only girl I've ever loved in my miserable life. And I let her down. At the first sign of trouble, I quit, not realizing that she just needed time to adjust. Not for us to just drop her like a bag of garbage.

Sure, we were hurting, but she was confused and frightened, and we just walked away like fucking children.

I tighten my grip even more, I've fucking missed holding her in my arms. It's like a piece of me has been gone these past couple of weeks.

And when I think about what could have happened to her tonight.

..My blood boils, searing my insides, and making me feel like I want to vomit, all at the same time.

Robert will hurt so badly he will wish he was dead, long before we do him the mercy of ending his pathetic life.

I've never wished for faith as much as I do now, just so I'd know for sure that he will be tortured in Hell for all eternity.

As I hold her, I silently vow to seek revenge. Then to spend every waking moment loving her with my whole heart.

My whole fucking soul and everything that I am, or ever will be, belongs to her now.

KAI

I close the door softly and take a deep breath, placing my forehead on the wood.

Then another.

Then another.

It doesn't help. Rage, like I haven’t known for years, burns my insides, blackening them until I feel like my whole being is darkness incarnate. Most people see red when they feel uncontrollable anger. I see black. The black of endless night, and monsters that'll devour your soul.

Blinking, I come back to myself. I head downstairs to wait for Ash. He's hurting badly and has never been good with his emotions. Like I told Lilly, he feels like he's personally responsible for what happened tonight.

He's not wholly wrong, we are all culpable. We abandoned her and opened her up for this sort of thing. It just never occurred to us that someone would be stupid enough to touch her after we'd claimed her.

More fool us.

I tidy the bits and pieces of first aid that Jax got out to tend to her wounds. I have to pause and focus on my breath several times, as the black once again threatens to consume me.

Once I'm back under control, I go to make some Bi Luo Chun tea. I find the ritual calming; heating the water to exactly two hundred and five degrees, measuring out the leaves into the warmed gaiwan, leaving the leaves to steep, then pouring the tea into the saucer.

I breathe out a sigh as the first slightly bitter sip enters my mouth, calming me instantly. Going to sit on the couch, I pick up my discarded iPad with my free hand, opening a new window on my dark web browser.

I won't take part in whatever harm we cause Robert physically.

If I'm let loose on him, there would be bits of him all over the floor while his heart still beats, his blood bathing me in delicious crimson.

My dick twitches at the thought of Lilly, naked and also covered in his blood, her hands bound as I pound into her.

Time for that in the future. We will have the rest of our lives to make it up to her , I think as I begin to systematically destroy Robert's life, one click at a time.

ASH

Once I'm outside in the crisp night air, I place my earbuds in, selecting Suffocate by Nathan Wagner to play. It suits my dark mood.

I fucked up.

We all did, but I messed up the worst. I'm meant to protect them, and along the way, Lilly became part of those included on that list. But I let her down. I wasn't there when it mattered, and it feels like a fucking knife has gone through my gut, cutting my insides to shreds.

Like my father, I'm the leader, the alpha, the top dog.

But unlike that cunt, I actually give a shit about the people under my care.

Those guys, and now it seems Lilly, are like family to me.

More so because I fucking chose them, over a father who's an evil son of a bitch, and a mother too doped up on tranquillizers to notice a fucking thing.

The song plays on, reminding me how badly I messed up.

My mind flashes back to when she burst through the door, broken, bleeding, and terrified. My hands clench at the thought of that cumstain laying his hands on her. Trying to take something that doesn't fucking belong to him.

A menacing growl escapes my lips when I think of how close he came.

How dare he even look in her direction! Let alone touch her. White hot rage fills me up until every atom of my being is burning with the need for violence. For vengeance.

Jax is right. Robert is a dead man walking, and his days are fucking numbered. We're coming for that asshole, and he'll be so broken by the time we're done, there won't be enough pieces to put him back together.